US admits years of atomic radiation tests on people

The new energy secretary has revealed
decades of experiments on unwitting victims,
and nuclear blasts in the air over civilians,
reports Simon Tisdall in Washington

The door to a secret
chamber of nuclear horrors is slowly being
prised open in the
United States, revealing government-ordered radiation experiments
on retarded children,
pregnant women, and convicts
and a range of other clandestine atom-age
projects which have shocked and frightened the
American public.

In the course of the last month the steady drip of newly
released records from the department of energy, the agency
which has overseen America's military and civilian
nuclear complex since the dawn of the nuclear
era, has turned into a torrent.

Collectively, the records conjure up a nightmarish picture.
They show how successive administrations, determined at all costs
to keep ahead of the Soviet Union in the cold war
nuclear arms race, repeatedly
and perhaps illegally placed thousands of unsuspecting
Americans at serious and lasting physical risk.

The government's human experiments, undisclosed atomic
weapons tests, and deliberate
radiation releases over populated areas began in 1945
after the atomic strike on Japan in August of that year.
In some cases they have continued almost until the present day.
They remained hidden for so long because of what Hazel O'Leary,
President Clinton's new energy secretary, calls a
culture of deception.

"We were shrouded and clouded in an atmosphere of secrecy,"
Ms O'Leary said recently. "And I would take it a step further.
I would call it repression."

Having taken control of the energy department earlier this year,
Ms O'Leary has clearly been shocked by what she found in its
archives. In an unprecedented move she ordered the review
of an estimated 32 million documents for possible declassification.
Many have already been released. She also ordered a sweeping investigation
into radiation experiments on humans.

Then, on Tuesday, Ms O'Leary took another extraordinary
step for a senior government official.
She said compensation for victims of the atom age
programmes would have to be considered.
"My view is that we must proceed with disclosing these
facts and information regardless of the fact of whether
it opens the door for a lawsuit against the government.
"We ought to go forward and
explain to the Congress what
has happened and let Congress
and the American public determine
what would be appropriate compensation,"
Ms O'Leary said. For America's defence establishment, it
is as if a whistle-blower has suddenly become
the boss.

So far, the department of energy records
and related research by congressional and journalistic
investigators have brought the following US
government projects to light.

At least 19 mentally retarded
boys were fed radioactive milk mixed with cereal in
experiments conducted by scientists
from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology in the 1940s and 1950s.

The experiments, funded by
the atomic energy commission,
were not fully explained to the
boys' parents. They were told,
in a letter, that "we are considering the
selection of a group of our brighter patients,
including your son to receive a special diet".
The boys were told they were participating in a science
club.

About 800 pregnant women
were dosed with radioactive iron in
a government-backed experiment at Vanderbilt
university in Tennessee in the late 1940s.
The objective was to gauge its effect on foetal
development. A follow-up study found a higher
than normal cancer rate among the women's
children.

In experiments conducted at
jails in Oregon and Washington
states the testicles of more than 130 male inmates
were exposed to high levels of radiation
from X-ray machines.
The prisoners were paid for
their trouble, but according to
Robert Alvarez, a senior aide to Ms O'Leary,
the risks were not fully explained to them. "These
prisoner studies were clearly
unethical." Mr Alvarez said
this month. The experiments continued until the early 1970s.
There have been no follow-up
studies since the prisoners
were released.

Eighteen patients with
apparently dangerous illnesses were injected with high
concentrations of plutonium at
laboratories managed by Chicago
and two other universities
in experiments between 1945 to
1947. The injections were
apparently made without the
patients' informed consent.

Similar experiments using injections
of radioactive calcium
were conducted on terminally
ill cancer patients in New York.

The purpose was to measure
the rate at which radioactive
substances are absorbed by
human tissue.

A congressional report,
drawing on department of energy
material, disclosed this month
that government scientists deliberately
exploded atomic bombs in the atmosphere
over the US in order to examine the spread
and effects of radioactive fallout.

The report identified 12 such
tests, including one in 1950 in
New Mexico after which radiation particle
levels were carefully measured in the town of
Watrous, 70 miles away. At the time, scientists
said there was no risk to people, even though
their purpose was to develop a weapon that would
kill enemy
soldiers through radioactive
fallout.

In fact, according to the Los Alamos national
laboratory,
nerve-centre of America's nuclear weapons
research, there
were about 240 experiments in
which radiation was deliberately released
into the atmosphere between 1944 and 1961
in New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Washington state,
and perhaps elsewhere.

"Releasing these amounts of
radiation on people in an area
in secret is a little hard to swallow,"
said Senator John Glenn,
the former astronaut, who is
pushing for the release of other
government departments' records,
including those of the Pentagon.

All of this has come on top of
Ms O'Leary's startling announcement on
December 8 that the government conducted
204 previously undisclosed
underground nuclear tests in
the US between 1963 and 1990.

Among this total are 18 unannounced tests undertaken
during the Reagan and Bush administrations. Independent
experts said they were at a loss to explain
exactly what these
later tests were for, or why they
were kept secret.

Ms O'Leary said that between
600 and 800 people were subjected
to government radiation
experiments; she has set up an
public telephone inquiry service
called the Human Experimentation Hotline.
In its first day in operation last week the
hotline was swamped with calls from
worried families.

The number of Americans intentionally exposed
to radioactive atom test fallout, and its lasting
after-effects, is unknown.

But a study of high fall-out
downwind areas in Utah, for example,
has found childhood leukaemia rates which are
2.5 times the national average.

In part, the human experiments were an attempt to
tackle incurable diseases, scientists of the period
have said. It is also pointed out that there
existed a great deal of honest ignorance
about the effects of radioactive substances.

Much of the macabre "evidence" of human experimentation
has been preserved. About 20,000 irradiated pieces of
people are kept at a national human tissue depository
in Spokane, in Washington state.

Environmentalists and others say
that Ms O'Leary and her staff - some of whom were
formerly active opponents of
the energy department and the
nuclear establishment - have
opened a Pandora's Box.

And the scale of the problem is staggering. A report
by the federal environmental protection agency
estimated recently that more than 43,000 military
and industrial sites in the US are or may be
contaminated by radioactivity.

Ms O'Leary says that by opening the files she hopes
to set an example for other nuclear powers and to
improve the department of energy's public image
as it begins its domestic post-Soviet
nuclear clean-up. But most of all, she said
recently, she wants the truth to come out.

When she learned of the human experiments she was
"appalled and shocked and it just gave me
an ache in my gut and my heart," Ms O'Leary said.

Chilling, too, was the publication this week of a 1950
memorandum to senior atomic energy commission officials from
a radiation biologist who worked for the agency.
The memo, written by Dr Joseph Hamilton, warned that human
experimentation was probably unethical,
possibly illegal, and perhaps a breach of the Nuremberg Code
of 1947.
If the information became public, Dr Hamilton said, there would
be a lot of criticism "as admittedly this would
have a little of the Buchenwald touch".